This edited volume features 20 essays written by leading scholars that provide a detailed examination of L’Homme by René Descartes. It explores the way in which this work developed themes not just on questions such as the circulation of the blood, but also on central questions of perception and our knowledge of the world. Coverage first offers a critical discussion on the different versions of L'Homme, including the Latin, French, and English translations and the 1664 editions. Next, the authors examine the early reception of the work, from the connection of L'Homme to early-modern Dutch Cartesianism to Nicolas Steno's criticism of the work and how Descartes' clock analogy is used to defend two different conceptions of the articulation between anatomical observations and functional hypotheses. The book then goes on to explore L'Homme and early-modern anthropology as well as the how the work has been understood and incorporated into the works of scientists, physicians, and philosophers over the last 150 years. Overall, readers will discover how the trend over the last few decades to understand human cognition in neuro-physiological terms can be seen to be not something unprecedented, but rather a revival of a way of dealing with these fundamental questions that was pioneered by Descartes.

Besides his more famous works of philosophy - Discourse on Method, Meditations on First Philosophy, and Principles of Philosophy - Descartes devoted a great deal of time and thought to the study of physiology and anatomy. An account of his activities in 1629 reports that he visited butcher shops on an almost daily basis to study specific animal organs, and he practiced dissection and even vivisection to explore the workings of major organ systems. In the 1630s, he assisted in the dissection of human cadavers - all to satisfy his intense curiosity about how bodies, animal and human, work. The fruits of this research can be found in his Treatise of Man, a work that he decided not to publish for fear of suffering the same fate as Galileo. Consequently, this fascinating treatise did not appear until twelve years after his death. Among its many intriguing features are his detailed descriptions of the nervous system and its interactions with the muscles to create movement in response to stimulus. Though we now know that many of these details are wrong, Descartes' understanding that much of the body functions as a machine was a stroke of genius. He is the first to describe the reflex arc, anticipating Pavlov and the behaviorists by almost 300 years. The idea of the body as a kind of animal machine that functions according to physical laws was an immense advance over the previous scholastic notions based on Aristotle, which merely begged the question of how the various organs of the body work by stating that it is in their nature to perform their specific functions. This is a landmark work that students of history, medicine, biology, and the history of science will find richly rewarding.

A literary, historical and philosophical discussion of attitudes to blindness by the sighted, and what the blind 'see'Why has there been a persistent fascination by the sighted, including philosophers, poets and the public, in what the blind 'see'? Is the experience of being blind, as Descartes declared, like 'seeing with the hands'? What happens on the rare occasions when surgery allows previously blind people to see for the very first time? And how did evidence from early experimental surgery inform those philosophical debates about vision and touch? These questions and others were prompted by a question that the Irish scientist, Molyneux, asked an English philosopher, Locke, in 1688, but which was to have implications for British empiricism, French sensationism, and the beginnings of psychology that outlasted the long tail of the Enlightenment. Through an unfolding historical and philosophical narrative the book follows up responses to this question in Britain and France, and considers it as an early articulation of sensory substitution, the substitution of one sense (touch) for another (vision). This concept has influenced attitudes towards blindness, and technologies for the blind and vision impaired, to this day.Key FeaturesUnfolds the history of 'blindness' from 17th century that shades into the beginnings of psychologyQuestions the assumed centrality of vision and the eye in Enlightenment philosophy and scienceTraces the core idea of 'sensory substitution' from hypothetical speculations in the 17th century to present day technologies for the blind and vision impaired

The Cambridge Descartes Lexicon is the definitive reference source on René Descartes, 'the father of modern philosophy' and arguably among the most important philosophers of all time. Examining the full range of Descartes' achievements and legacy, it includes 256 in-depth entries that explain key concepts relating to his thought. Cumulatively they uncover interpretative disputes, trace his influences, and explain how his work was received by critics and developed by followers. There are entries on topics such as certainty, cogito ergo sum, doubt, dualism, free will, God, geometry, happiness, human being, knowledge, Meditations on First Philosophy, mind, passion, physics, and virtue, which are written by the largest and most distinguished team of Cartesian scholars ever assembled for a collaborative research project - 92 contributors from ten countries.

An illustrious team of scholars offer a rich survey of the thought of Rene Descartes; of the development of his ideas by those who followed in his footsteps; and of the reaction against Cartesianism. Epistemology, method, metaphysics, physics, mathematics, moral philosophy, political thought, medical thought, and aesthetics are all covered.

How did the relations between philosophy and science evolve during the 17th and the 18th century? This book analyzes this issue by considering the history of Cartesianism in Dutch universities, as well as its legacy in the 18th century. It takes into account the ways in which the disciplines of logic and metaphysics became functional to the justification and reflection on the conceptual premises and the methods of natural philosophy, changing their traditional roles as art of reasoning and as science of being. This transformation took place as a result of two factors. First, logic and metaphysics (which included rational theology) were used to grant the status of indubitable knowledge of natural philosophy. Second, the debates internal to Cartesianism, as well as the emergence of alternative philosophical world-views (such as those of Hobbes, Spinoza, the experimental science and Newtonianism) progressively deprived such disciplines of their foundational function, and they started to become forms of reflection over given scientific practices, either Cartesian, experimental, or Newtonian.

This new comparative study considers the impact of Descartes's thought on early modern philosophy, theology and science. This consideration reveals that competing Cartesianisms emerged in the Netherlands and France during a period dating from the last decades of Descartes's life to the century or so following his death in 1650.